The Cost of Chat Compared to Voice in the Contact Contact or Call Center
I have been asked this question more than a few times. Often people are looking at implementing chat or webchat in their call or contact center and they need to justify the ROI. In this post we will briefly provide an overview as to how you can calculate the costs and the potential savings.
On average a chat session lasts as long as a voice call, so the cost for each appears on the surface to be the same. However it is not possible to complete more than one voice call at a single time. With chat, we can support multiple chat sessions simultaneously. this is referred to as concurrency. This is possible because rather than an a voice call which is a conversation, always on and connected a chat session is really a sequence of individual interactions, call and response. The level of concurrency that can be support by a chat agent is primarily a function of the availability of short form content that they can employ and share with the consumer. If the chat agent must type all responses themselves in the dialogue window then they will constantly be responding to what the consumer has entered. If on the other hand the chat agent is able to ‘push’ or send short form text (FAQ’s, templated responses, policies etc,), links and pages to the consumer, they will gain free time, while the consumer reads, reviews or digests that information. This free time allows the chat agent to accept another incoming chat session. In center with robust short form text with embedded links can often support 2-3 chats simultaneously.
So back to the topic of cost for a chat versus a call. If a call costs based on the agent time $6.00 for the sake of this illustration and the chat agent can support 3 concurrent chats over the same time period then the costs of each chat is $2.00 ( the $6.00 cost of the agent time divided by 3, the number of concurrent sessions).
Let us know if you have any questions on this or other #callcenter , #contactcenter or #custexp related issues and we will be happy to assist you.
Colin
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1 comment:
Hi Colin, that’s a great illustration of the cost-effectiveness of web chat. There are also other benefits – happier customers who don’t have to pick up the phone and can get a fast response, and also the chance to better understand the customer and potentially upsell additional products and services they may not know about. However we’ve done some research into how UK brands are using web chat and found that only 7% have deployed it, showing a missed opportunity. You can read more on this in our blog at http://eptica.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/the-real-story-about-web-chat-usage/
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